


made of our longest days

by atlantisairlock



Category: Magic School Bus
Genre: Character Study, Character(s) of Color, Class As Family, Friendship, Gen, Goodbyes, Growing Up, Loss of Innocence, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), Original Character Death(s), POV Second Person, Parent Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-13 12:59:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5709076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the long haul's over, what's next?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. tusayan, arizona

**Author's Note:**

> netflix finally came to singapore and the first thing i did was binge watch magic school bus so... here we go.
> 
> title from 'make them gold' by chvrches.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: carlos (main).

Even though none of you would ever admit it under oath, you think the thing is this -

you all thought that fifth grade was going to last forever. 

The field trips become an accepted fact of school life. Your days are filled with unexplainable magic, and you truly enjoy them. There is a camaraderie to be found amongst the people you navigate worlds beyond your own with. Field trips aren't an everyday occurrence, but close enough, and you learn so much about the world around you that you never expected you'd discover.

So. You think fifth grade is going to last forever. Perhaps you hope. Perhaps you pretend. Perhaps you forget.

Either way - 

it doesn't.

 

 

One week, your mother takes you shopping for new shoes. It's a mind-numbing affair, and you spend much of the trip sitting around reading a comic book while she sifts through the selection. You finally settle on a sleek grey pair of sneakers just so you can go home. 

"Why are we buying new shoes anyway?" You grumble when she's at the counter handing over her credit card, and she looks down at you in surprise. "Carlos, you graduate in a week, remember? Next term you'll be in middle school, isn't that exciting? You need new shoes for the graduation ceremony, and to celebrate!" 

And this is when you learn - everything ends.

 

 

The last week of school is utterly normal, and thus utterly weird. The eight of you fall into some mockery of a Normal Class, where you come to school, complete some final exercises and clean up your homeroom. Ms Frizzle takes attendance, hands out progress reports and fancy little diplomas, and wishes you well for the coming year. 

The graduation ceremony is a little subdued, and all of you disperse afterwards with parents in tow. The atmosphere is awkward, and you know you have to break the tension - that has always been your role in the class - so you run up to D.A. who's just a few steps away from you and tug on her sleeve. "D.A. Hey!" You begin, and falter for a moment. Why is this so hard, when it never has been? "Um - have a good summer. See you at the other block next term."

She stops in her tracks and looks down at your hand on the fabric of her sweater, avoiding your gaze. "I'm - I won't be there, Carlos, I'm - my family and I, we're going back to Australia for a while, and I won't be back for - some time."

You bite your lip, drop your hand, put on a brave smile. "Cool." You answer in an offbeat tone. "Have fun! And keep in touch, OK?" 

"OK." She agrees, scribbling her address down on a scrap of paper and pressing it into your pocket. "Take care." 

The paper seems to burn a hole through your shirt, and you are very proud of the fact that you don't cry until you're in your room back home.

 

 

You don't see D.A. again after that, but at least you get to send Wanda off when she returns to Shanghai. It comes as a surprise to all of you, Wanda inclusive. You don't find out why she leaves, and neither does she, apparently. Her family gets in the car and drives off into the sunset, and she waves all the way from the back seat, shouting that she'll be back. But you aren't  _naive_ like everyone thinks you are, and there are things you know. 

Phoebe leaves, next, and that isn't so much of a surprise. You're out of town when it happens, and you receive the news in the form of a postcard all the way from the Big Apple, handwritten in Phoebe's familiar print. You wonder if her classmates at her new school will hear all about the lavish stories from  _at my old school_ that they'll probably dismiss as make-believe. 

 

 

Middle school rolls around, and you start taking lessons in a different block of the schoolhouse. Two mundane weeks into the term, your new teacher says the magic words -  _field trip!_ \- and you sit up straight in your seat. 

You're hoping against hope and it doesn't work, because the bus you board is agonisingly ordinary and the class chatters around you on the short drive up to the new water reclamation plant. You line up in two neat rows and take a guided tour through the areas open to the public. 

You catch Ralphie staring at the water rushing through the massive pipes under your feet when the guide is droning on about how water is filtered, and you know what he's thinking - that once upon a time, you too were part of this cycle, even for just an afternoon. Never again, and it feels surreal. 

You finish the tour without incident and head back to school. Arnold looks strangely despondent on the ride back, and you nudge him and ask him why.

"That was normal." He says in a hushed tone, shaking his head. "For a whole year that's all I've wanted - a  _normal_ field trip - and now that I've got it, it's just... wrong."

"Yeah?" You respond, patting his shoulder. "I know what you mean."

The next day, it's you who stays home. 

Your parents are understandably worried. Your father sits by your bed and takes your temperature. "What's wrong, Carlos?" He asks quietly. "You used to be so excited about going to school - what happened?"

A knot tightens and clenches in your stomach. You roll over and murmur that you're just not feeling well. 

 

 

You manage to scrape your way through middle school, just barely, with your friends by your side. High school brings with it a world of new experiences, but it takes with it Ralphie and Arnold too. The neighbourhood is getting richer and fancier, and it's too expensive for Ralphie and his single mother to pay the rent. Arnold's father gets a promotion and a job offer in London, and that's the end of that. 

The remaining three of you are divvied up into separate classes. You have the same lunch break, so at least you get to meet up on a daily basis, but within the first month, Tim and Keesha make new friends and start sitting with their classes instead.To their credit, they both invite you to sit with them and their new circles. You say no, and you try to interact with your class, tell yourself that you just need more time, better puns, and you'll forge better bonds, but it doesn't happen. You find yourself huddling in a corner of the cafeteria most lunches with a carton of milk and wonder  _when_ and  _why_ and  _how._

You don't make any friends of your own, which does wonders for your grades - you pull straight As and a solid grade point average - but your form tutor still pulls your parents aside and that's how you end up at a counsellor's office, toying with a worry doll as he asks you about your life. On a whim, you tell him everything - adventures in space, deep sea diving, inside beehives, anthills, the human body. He smiles and nods the whole way through, then speaks to your parents when he thinks you're in the bathroom, tells them that you have a very active imagination and you're probably just retreating into the whimsy of your childhood because you're having trouble adjusting to the stress of a high school environment.

You realise, then, that nobody will ever believe you. You don't talk about it again, and you mingle with your class to the best of your ability. It satisfies your tutor and your parents, and it's more than enough for you.

 

 

Halfway through the school year, Keesha's grandmother dies. She's stoic about it up till the afternoon of the funeral, when she rings you and Tim. "Please come." She begs, her voice achingly choked with tears through the line. "You're the only ones who really understand."

You take off running out of the door even before she's done talking, and you cover four blocks on foot in record time. Your lungs burn and you're sticky with sweat by the time you get there, but Keesha just throws her arms around both of you and sobs her thanks. You hold her hand when they scatter the ashes, and the three of you sit beneath the shade of a huge tree after the ceremony, listening to Keesha reminiscence in between her sniffles. 

It's evening by the time she calms down to drop the bomb. "I've inherited my grandmother's old home in North Dakota, and I'm leaving at the end of the year."

And that's how you say your last goodbye.

 

 

Tim is in your class the next term, and it stays that way up until your last year of high school, even though all your other classmates come and go. You don't expect it, but the both of you slip right back into your old patterns. Tim still talks to his buddies, but he sticks by your side, and both of you become known as best friends. 

Replies get spottier and sparser but you keep sending your postcards until the day you send one to Phoebe and it comes back two weeks later with a polite letter telling you that the person the postcard is addressed to has since moved away. 

You stop buying stamps after that, put the yellowing postcards you've received into a shoebox, and hide it at the back of your closet. 

 

 

High school is tough, but Tim comes over to your house to do homework together, you snag a part-time job at the cafe down the street from your place, you apply for colleges, you discover that you really do have a flair for invention - 

imperceptibly, life moves on.

 

 

You stop seeing Ms Frizzle, or Liz, or the Bus, after fifth grade, which you get used to after a while.

The postcards stop arriving at all, which you can understand, too.

But the shock really comes when you're eighteen, and you head back to your elementary school just for fun, and you're walking the halls - and when you pass by the door to what used to be your homeroom, it's boarded up. 

The frenzy you get into bemuses the old custodian more than anything. He tells you that the room hasn't been used in a long time, and that's how you and Tim end up spending an entire day scouring your town for evidence, proof, anything - 

you search for  _hours,_ till your feet are probably bleeding, but the empty lot by Wanda's old house is now home to an antiques store, Ms Frizzle's pinball machine is missing from the school grounds, the bakery you visited to make the birthday cake is no longer where you remember it, and you just can't seem to find the right turnoff to the Sound Museum. You get more and more panicked as the hours tick by, and it isn't until Tim puts a hand on your shoulder and leads you to a park bench that you just break down and cry.

 _Janet had the right idea, wanting to bring Plutonian rocks back home,_ you think idly when Tim's gone to the nearby convenience store to get you a snack and a drink. There's  _nothing,_ you realise, feeling despair clawing at the inside of your chest. There's absolutely nothing at all to prove that you ever rode a magic Bus and Ms Frizzle took you on out-of-this-world field trips that you'll remember for the rest of your life. 

"Do you... do you ever think we just made it all up?" You venture later that evening, when you're sitting on the swings in the park playground while Tim sketches from his spot on the bottom of the slide - which is a stupid question, acting if that incredible year was just some shared hallucination amongst the eight of you or something - and Tim knows it, because he turns to you and affixes you with a stare so intense you almost reel. "It  _happened,_ Carlos." He says, eerily calm with a tremor of distress beneath the veneer. "All of it, it was real. You know that. It was." 

And the thing is this - you're not so sure any more. It's been eight years and it's so much hazier now, the memories having the consistency of a dream. You are scared you will lose this. You don't ever want to forget. 

 

 

You are accepted to MIT and your parents, now older, more tired, are joyous. Mikey fist-bumps you and tells you he'll join you soon enough. When Tim bangs on your front door with a huge grin and tells you he's going to MassArt, you nearly collapse. It means you're a ten-minute drive away from each other, just across the Charles River.

It means that even in this, he didn't leave you behind. 

Your colleges are across the country from home, but your family helps you pack and Tim sits with you on the plane, so you take a bit of home with you, and that's good enough. The world is full of possibilities, and you are so, so ready to explore them. Somewhere deep inside you, you are still that ten-year-old boy who played a game of frictionless baseball in D.A.'s physics book and jumped gamely into the Suppose-A-Tron to explore the past, and you are endlessly curious about the world around you. You want to make things. You want to delve into them, take them apart and put them back together. 

You think Ms Frizzle would have been proud.

You think the class would have been happy for you.

 

 

Yours is a long, hard slog, and Tim finishes his degree earlier than you do. Or at least you think that's what happens, until he comes to your dorm with a expression of total seriousness and that's when you feel it. A cold, creeping feeling that crawls through you, and you just  _know_ something is happening that will shift and change your world as you know it, and you won't be able to stop it, and there have already been so many times in your life when a line became drawn between  _before_ and  _after,_ _was_ and  _will be._

This is one of them.

"Carlos." He says, very, very quiet, even for  _Tim._ "I cut my degree short." 

"Why?" The words come out of your mouth without you even thinking about them. They sound bitter, and you aren't surprised.

"I met this girl in MassArt, Carlos. We've been - it's going - well - she's, I know she's the one I want to spend the rest of my life with. And the thing is... her father is dying. He's back home and she's going to go back - permanently - and take care of him and just take on the family business, duty before passion and all that. And I'm going with her." 

Slivers of ice slide through your veins. "But you  _love_ art and design."

"I know." Tim replies, looking pained, and it sounds like he does. "But I love her too. Carlos, look, I promise we'll keep in touch. I won't stop sending letters and everything just because I'm away. I'm just a state off, I'll be in New Hampshire. I'll visit when I can, I promise. Trust me."

And you do, so you say goodbye. 

The next semester, you are well and truly alone.

 

 

You graduate with a degree in Engineering and go home on the first flight out. Mikey follows in your footsteps first thing, so you're home and you're on your own and after the hustle and bustle of moving your things into your new house, you take a walk around the neighbourhood to catch a breather.

The first thing you realise is that you no longer recognise your hometown. Even the playground you and Tim sat in that day is being torn down to make way for a shopping mall.

You go home and draft a letter to Tim. 

 

 

When you are twenty-six, you marry a quiet, pleasant girl who moves into the town for the environment. It doesn't work out, but before the marriage breaks down you have a daughter together and name her Arden. She's the best thing that ever happens to you, Ms Frizzle and the Bus inclusive. Your ex leaves the town after the divorce, and custody of your daughter goes to you. You become busier, having to take care of your little girl alone, and after a while, after she starts going to school and it's utterly ordinary, you really start to believe that it was all just a dream. 

And perhaps that's the catalyst.

Perhaps that's what brings you home. 

 

 

Arden comes home one afternoon after school and jabbers on excitedly about a forest that just seems to have sprung up at the edge of the town. It stirs something inside you, tugs irresistibly. You leave her with Mikey and ask him to help her with her homework, and walk across the neighbourhood to find the forest. The air feels warm, almost cozy, like you're slipping back into the safety and security of fifth grade.

It doesn't even feel like a shock of any sort when you find yourself deep in the heart of the woods that definitely weren't there yesterday, and sitting beneath a massive oak tree is the Bus. 

Shabbier, worn-out, run-down, rusty, scratched, but - 

it's the Bus.

It's your Bus. 

For a moment, you don't even dare to touch it. What if it's a dream? What if it disappears before your eyes like it did in fifth grade, along with Liz and Ms Frizzle? 

But you have to - you have to find out if it was all real.

You lay a hand on the hood - 

and it comes to life. The Bus' eyes open and a smile curves across the front and something explodes and blooms within your chest. 

"Bus." You say cautiously, and it honks softly. You want to ask it where your teacher and the class pet are, but something tells you it no longer matters. Something tells you that the ownership of the Bus now lies upon the shoulders of someone else.

_Take chances! Make mistakes. Get messy!_

You climb into the driver's seat, heart pounding. Instinctively you  _know_ what to press, you know how to work the panel. You were meant to find the Bus. You were meant to pilot it. 

_What do you want to do?_

The Bus' voice is nothing like you'd have imagined, speaking directly into your mind, but it's reassuring. 

"Bus... please help me find everyone else. Please."

There is nothing else to say. The Bus shrinks, morphs into a falcon, and begins the voyage.

 

 

You let the bus take over, which means that it stops at the closest place first. You land on a windowsill in the heart of San Francisco in the form of a beetle and get the bus to un-shrink you while staying small. Ralphie nearly has a heart attack and drops his toast, but runs to hug you anyway. 

His apartment is small but beautifully furnished, with baseball memorabilia on the walls and photographs littering the mantle. They're mostly of friends and him and his mother - he shrugs and smiles. "I live alone now." He tells you, and he doesn't seem unhappy about it, but his eyes light up when you invite him onto the bus.

"One sec, Carlos!" He calls, and runs into his bedroom. He comes back out with a familiar red cap, and you grin. "Let's go!"

 

 

The Bus has a chance to go back to its full size when you get to North Dakota, because Keesha's on her farm and there's nobody around her for miles. "Don't land on the crops!" She yells at you when you're a couple feet above the ground. 

You settle in a field and she invites you in for lunch. You don't even need to ask. She sets up some irrigation to tend to the crops while she's away, and off you go again.

 

 

Tim is the last person who's still in the United States. Apparently he's told his wife and children about the Bus, because when you reach New Hampshire and you're greeted by a beautiful redhead with a twinkle in her eye, her reaction isn't one of stunned shock. 

"I've heard a lot about you." She says, smiling.

"If it's from Tim, it's all lies." Ralphie answers with a laugh.

Tim greets you with a bearhug and introduces you to his daughters, Val and Eliza, and his son, Carl. They look like their parents, curious and eager, and you almost invite them onto the Bus with you. It would be nice for a new generation to experience what you did - but Tim puts his foot down and makes them stay at home to finish their homework. 

"Come back safe," his wife says, and he nods, and you start to understand why he left, so many years ago.

 

 

 

The Bus is magic but it's still a long flight to Limerick. The Bus morphs into a dog, pads its way into Phoebe's veterinary office and you don't even get past the counter before she spots you.

"I can't believe you're here!" She yells when you're safely hidden. "It's been so  _long!"_

She closes the office for the day and tells her beleaguered secretary that she'll be back soon enough.

 

 

When you land on Arnold's desk in London, the first thing he does is roll his eyes. "I knew I should have stayed home today."

You all laugh, and he breaks into a smile. "So, do you need me to argue a case for you?"

"Dream  _on,_ Arnold." Keesha says. "Your fees are too expensive for all of us. Are you in or out?"

"It's not really a field trip, is it?" He asks, but he's already getting on the Bus.

 

 

It doesn't feel like a tight squeeze, even though all of you are bigger than you were two decades ago. It's probably magic. 

You swoop in to pick Wanda up in Hong Kong. She dumps her paperwork without a second thought. 

"You never returned my postcard!" She shouts at you the minute Ralphie helps her up onto the Bus, and you grin. "Nice to see you too, Wanda."

 

 

 _Last one,_ the Bus says to you hours later, when you're already nodding off.  _Here we are._

Arnold is totally unimpressed. "Of all the places to live in, and you chose the Australian outback?"

"Don't knock it, Perlstein." D.A. warns, squeezing your shoulder. "Thank you for coming for me. Now come in for dinner."

 

 

You end up having homecooked dinner in the Bus, talking and laughing and it's just like the old days, even if some of you haven't seen each other in years and years. 

 _I've got enough steam in me for one more trip,_ the Bus says, and this time, all of you hear it. You lapse into silence. 

"Where should we go?" Phoebe asks after a few minutes, but really, it isn't much of a choice at all.

"Bus." D.A. states clearly and calmly, laying a hand on the steering wheel. "Please take us to Ms Frizzle."

And you think you hear it laugh, low and happy, as you begin to take off. 

"Where are we going?" Keesha yells as you begin spinning through the air.

 _Everywhere,_ the Bus answers.  _Are you ready for another adventure?_


	2. san francisco, california

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: ralphie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the last census puts tusayan's population at about 500-plus. this work of fiction postulates that tusayan became more populated and more commercialised, so the population stat is fictional. concord does have about 120K citizens in real life, though. 
> 
> i've heard enough to convince me that teaching in america is unenviable, plus my parents are both teachers, so i speak from second hand experience.

You are ten and three-quarters when your father dies -

and that sets into motion a lot of other things in your life. 

 

 

Your mother is not native to Tusayan, and you're young, but not so young that you can't tell she's always been chafing for her home. She is a city girl at heart, and you're sure she would have packed up and moved home once Dad died if not for the fact that you're firmly rooted where you are. She stays for you, and you spend the rest of your life grateful for it. 

Middle school is - different. It's nothing like elementary school - it's a drastic change and when you tell your mother about your concerns, she laughs, ruffles your hair and informs you that high school is going to feel like you're on another planet altogether. 

You don't tell her about how you've actually  _been_ to another planet. You get the feeling she'll never believe you. 

 

 

Tusayan changes around you. It starts out small, cozy, neighbourly, and somewhere along the line, you look up from your summer reading and your science projects and realise that everything is taller, fancier, sharper around the edges. Your mother is visibly stressed, and you see her going through the accounts again and again at the dinner table while she thinks you're in your bedroom finishing your homework. 

Furniture starts disappearing from the house, there's less and less mail coming in, and you see all the signs even before she sits you down on the sofa and puts her hands on your shoulders.

"Ralphie." She says your name like a plea, and you already know what's coming, but you still seize up and the tears prick at your eyes. "Ralphie, I'm sorry - I'm so sorry - I know how much you love this place. But it's getting too expensive to live here - I can't afford everything on one person's salary." 

And you understand, of course. You don't blame her. It's not her fault that your father died, it's not her fault that even with all the scrimping and saving, she can't afford to live alone in a town that's rapidly sprawling. Concord is bigger and busier, but there will be more job opportunities and you have family there, people who will help both of you out in a pinch. It is the best decision. You know that.

It doesn't make it hurt any less when you pack your whole life into two suitcases and buy plane tickets one-way. 

 

 

Tusayan has about nine hundred people living within it, give or take. 

Concord has a _hundred and twenty thousand,_ and the moment you step into the airport you want to run away and take the first flight back. 

You don't, of course - you put on a brave face and laugh and joke with your mother while you wait for your luggage at the conveyor belt. Your aunt picks both of you up at the arrival hall and exclaims at how tall you've grown since she last saw you. 

Here in Concord, everything is different. Gone is your spacious two-storey home, your back garden, your porch. Your apartment isn't cramped, no, but it's just not what you've been used to your whole life. 

You're so busy unpacking, refurbishing your room and perusing furniture stores with your mother that you completely forget to be sad. You're too busy to dwell on what you left behind. It's not until a month later that you're thumbing through your textbook trying to figure out which chapter you've been assigned to read when it hits you like a slug in the chest. Your stomach roils, and you don't even realise you're bawling until your mother runs in, eyes wide. "Ralphie! What's wrong?"

You're fifteen years old, but you end up sobbing into her shoulder for ten minutes while she holds you tight. 

"I want to go home." You finally say, once you've calmed down enough to speak.

Your mother looks at you with anguish written all over her face. "Oh, Ralphie..." She whispers. "This  _is_ home."

 

 

High school goes as well as can be expected. You never really do get used to how loud everything is, the endless hustle and bustle, so many unfamiliar faces you never match names to. Your teachers are subpar. Ironically, they are what inspire you to become a teacher yourself. Perhaps it's Ms Frizzle's lingering influence, the way she breathed life into - well, everything. It was never just the field trips and you've always known it - even without the Bus, lessons with the Friz would always have been one of a kind.

Your mother can't suppress her shock the day you tell her you're officially a physics professor teaching high school students. 

"I thought sports were your passion." She says, though her smile is approving. You shrug. "I think this is what I was always meant to do." 

Your mother beams. "I'm so proud of you."

And that makes it all worthwhile, however hard the journey was. 

 

 

Here's what you learn, right off the bat: teaching is a thankless job. Nobody goes into it for the money, one of your colleagues tells you. Cynical old Sanders says that most everyone got into the profession because of some stupid noble reason and ended up stuck in a rut with nowhere else to go.

And you try so hard not to fall into that trap. You try so hard to keep the passion alive. But you've never claimed to be strong, and the years wear down on you, and after a while, it's a routine more than anything. 

You wake up one day realising you've become one of the teachers you resented so much, and that stokes a spark inside you, makes you try and put your best foot forward again, 

then your mother dies. 

This time, it's raw and devastates you, shakes you to the core. Suddenly the flat that seemed so impossibly small when you first moved is too big, too empty, too quiet. Your voice echoes off the walls. You turn up the thermostat but it's still too cold, all of the time.

You turn in your two weeks' notice, pack everything up, and leave. It's like having major surgery, rips a fresh wound into you when you pass the key to the apartment over to its new tenant, but this is what you need to do.

 

 

You toy with the idea of moving back to Tusayan, at first, but you get the feeling that would be undoing everything you've tried to accomplish, even though you're not exactly sure what that is.

You decide to start with a clean slate, so you rent a room in the heart of San Francisco, get a job coaching baseball to little kids, and you wait.

 _What for?_ You ask yourself on your thirtieth birthday, after you've waited six years and what you've been waiting for hasn't come.

You don't know. You still don't. After all this time, and what you want, what will fill that emptiness in your heart, is still an undefined shadow in your consciousness. 

It feels like you've wasted your life. 

And you just don't know what to do about it.

 

 

It is an ordinary Tuesday morning when you get up, head to the kitchen to make some coffee and spread butter on toast, you're on automaton like you've been for the past half-decade. You're still half-asleep when you walk into the living room and Carlos is standing by your sofa. 

You quite nearly fall over in a dead faint.

To Carlos' disappointment, you do not, in fact, make a total fool out of yourself by doing so. Instead you pull him close, hug him, and when he invites you onto the Bus, something clicks inside you. 

The Bus lands on your elbow, still in shrunken beetle form, blinks at you once, and you think it knows. It's not Tusayan that's home, and it never has been.

"You coming?" Carlos asks, and you tell him to wait, run into your room to get your red cap. It doesn't fit. It hasn't, for a long time now. But when you hold it in your hands, you feel safe once more. 

When you climb into the Bus with Carlos at the wheel, the Bus smiles.

_I've been waiting for you too._


	3. burlington, north dakota

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: keesha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> burlington isn't actually known for an agricultural economy, but north dakota as a whole is, so i'm taking my liberties where i can.

The class doesn't know it, but -

they give you a reason to _be_.

 

 

You grow up in a small town, which means that by default, you learn about your parents even if it was never your grandmother's intention. You know that they were involved in an accident, and it's not that they wanted to leave you behind. You come to be intimately familiar with that fact, since you become known in town for being  _that orphan girl._ Adults greet you on the street and in the stores with pitying apologies falling from their lips, dripping with overwhelming sincerity, and you  _hate_ it. 

Everyone acts like you're so delicate, so pitiful, and you're tired of it even before you leave elementary school. You're so used to your grade school classmates embodying the mindsets of their parents that you honestly don't expect much by the time you reach fifth grade.

But your teacher, and indeed your class, takes you by surprise. There is no pity, just matter-of-fact childlike friendship. For the first time you are your own person, defined by your behaviour in the classroom and your own words, your own actions. You embrace it, and this is how you settle. This is how you blossom. This is how you learn ambition, and strength, and wit. 

You are just a child, but you learn, very early on, that you would protect them with every inch of your life.

 

 

You're the brave one. The loud one. The one who doesn't break under pressure, no matter what. It's why you  _never_ cry - not when you see Ralphie staring into space at the water reclamation plant, not when Carlos turns his head and thinks you can't see him bite his lip, not when Tim buries himself in his sketchbook and doesn't look up, not when Arnold leaves. It's not that you're cold, but you have always been the strong one. If the boys can't be strong, you will have to do it for them. You're tight-lipped and stiff-jawed and that's how you enter high school. Your grandmother touches you on the arm when you're labelling your textbooks. "You are allowed to soften, my dear."

You want to tell her you know, but you just shake your head, square your shoulders, walk on like nothing can touch you. 

If you pretend long enough, it could be true.

 

 

High school gives you a chance to begin again. Carrying the weight of grief upon your shoulders has taken its toll, and being able to interact with people whose pasts you don't need to accomodate is refreshing in some twisted, warped fashion. You make friends who share their lunches with you and invite you to study with them after school. You think you could be content with this life. 

You are just a freshman when your grandmother's heart gives out on her. She has nobody left, so you find yourself well and truly alone with the deed to a house and a farm states over in North Dakota, and a letter that promises you will not be bereft of a support system if you leave for Burlington. 

_There are people back home who are as good as family,_ your grandmother's spidery handwriting skitters across the page you hold in one shaking hand.  _You will not be alone._

You don't talk to anybody about it, your new friends inclusive. They send flowers and their condolences. Your neighbours help to arrange the funeral. Everything is fine. You are calm. This is just another constant in life. 

An hour before she's supposed to be lowered into the ground, you make a break for the nearest phone and dial Carlos and Tim in quick succession. 

"I'm on my way, wait for me." Tim says reassuringly. Carlos just drops the phone on his end and takes off before you even finish your sentence. 

They don't just grip your elbow and hold you tight and listen to you wax nostalgic about your grandmother, they cry with you, too. 

It hurts so much to tell them where you're going, and more so to see their faces fall. 

 

 

The school lets you finish out your year, so you're sixteen when you fly to North Dakota. A distant cousin of yours helps you with all the logistical concerns and gives you clear instructions on how to transfer from an international to domestic flight at the airport, then picks you up at the terminal with a welcoming smile. 

The townspeople treat you like one of their own, and like an adult with your own agency, not a child left parentless. It's something you take time to adjust to, but it's not unpleasant. Everyone, as promised, chips in to help you set up on your piece of land. You end up growing wheat. It's not easy to begin with, but you have helping hands around you and you already have green fingers, and it makes you wonder if your grandmother planned this all along, kept you working in the garden to prepare you for the day you would come back to this place. 

You are young, but you work day in and day out, get your hands dirty, participate in community rituals, and it feels strangely right. It's not Tusayan, but it's something. 

You think your boys would have liked it here. 

 

 

Carlos stops writing, and you don't feel as much of a loss as you thought you would.

You keep all his postcards, though, put them up on a corkboard in your kitchen, and lose yourself in routine. It's good. You earn a living and become an established member of the community. 

This is how you grow up, you realise. This is how you thrive.

 

 

\- or not?

You go back to Tusayan, just once, because your grandmother is buried there after all, and it feels wrong not to visit her.

It's changed a great deal, but you still see familiar faces every now and then, and your favourite cafe is still open where you left it. You get a smoothie and walk out onto the pavement and bump into Mikey Ramon. 

"Keesha!" He grins, and you smile back. "I haven't seen you around in a while."

"Where's Carlos?" You reply, and the immediacy with which it falls from your lips feels like a pang in your stomach. Mikey doesn't notice, evidently, because he replies without missing a beat. "He went to MIT - with Tim, actually, who's at MassArt, now."

Which effectively means that in that moment, you're the only one out of the good old eight who's in your hometown. 

Time moves slow in Burlington, and it crashes down on you, then, that the world has been changing around you.

You don't go back again.

 

 

You have always been the strong one,

so you don't fall to your knees when the Bus lands five feet from the recently ploughed fields, you just yell at Carlos and you invite him in for a meal. 

And North Dakota is good, and you've got something to come back to now, but you think you want to see what else has changed while you were caught up in this tiny corner of your universe.

He doesn't even need to ask. 


	4. rochester, new hampshire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: tim.

You might not have been as ambitious as Keesha, but -

you've always had big dreams, and you'll do everything you can do make them come true.

 

 

You have always been the observer, so you don't really fit in anywhere, but you don't stand out either. You blend right into your fifth grade class and you don't make a best friend, but you all work together well, and that's enough.

This means that you sail through middle school, and when you get to high school, it's a piece of cake to merge with the crowd and engage in conversation with everyone around you. Which is fine. You've never felt that magical bond that everybody talks about - knowing someone is your soulmate, whether that be platonic or romantic. You devote your time to your passion, fill up sketchbook after sketchbook, hone and refine the talent you know you have. 

Then the principal asks for you on the last day of term, calls you into her office. Sitting there are Mr and Mrs Ramon, who smile at you and ask if you'd mind terribly joining a new class - Carlos' class.

"He's not been adjusting well to the high school environment." His father says, and something curls and unfolds inside you. "We thought it would be good if he had someone he knows with him." 

There is no hesitation when you agree. 

 

 

Carlos is far more subdued and tired than you remember him being back when you were kids, but he is still the witty, sharp-eyed, intelligent boy you knew and liked. Both of you talk about your grade school field trips, and you come to discover what it's like to have a best friend. Someone who'll stick by you no matter what. You wonder how you forgot how uninhibited you could be around someone who shared a secret with you. 

You said yes in the principal's office for Carlos, but you're realising now that it was as much for you as it was for him. He keeps you on your toes, and in turn, you keep him grounded. When he doubts the legitimacy of his memories, when he begins to question that both of you ever went on those field trips with the rest of your class, you tell him firmly that it happened. 

You go home, after that, and pull out a cardboard box of sketches you made when you were younger. They are coarser, the strokes less sure, but they have captured your childhood perfectly. Phoebe's flower, the water cycle, an underwater volcano. All of them you pack neatly into a carton and scrawl Carlos' name on the side in permanent marker. 

They will be his, when the time is right.

 

 

You are diligent and hardworking, and Carlos is creative and clever, and between both of you, you do incredibly well. You graduate valedictorian of the batch, and Carlos cheers you from the stands when you make a brief speech. Your parents tell you how proud they are of you, how wonderful it is that you're going to pursue your dreams. 

You are an artist. You live for your art. You have slogged your whole life for this, and you want it so badly, you want it more than anything. 

When your acceptance letter comes, the first thing you do is run to Carlos' house. 

"MassArt!" You yell when he opens the door, and his jaw drops, his face floods with joy.

This is how it was always meant to be.

 

 

And it stays like that, for long enough. All you want to do is get your degree and start on the career you've always wanted to pursue. You want to make your family so proud. You are young and green and you've got your entire life planned out, and you can't imagine anything different.

Jan changes - everything. She's bright and outspoken and dedicated, brave and filial and so many other adjectives you could spend your whole life saying. When you meet her in the quad for the first time, you feel the same way you did when you and Carlos became high school classmates. But this is deeper. This consumes you like nothing ever has. You both become so close you even tell her about the Bus, Ms Frizzle, and your field trips, and she doesn't laugh, doesn't ridicule you, but the shine in her eyes makes you think she wishes she had been there, too. 

"What are you going to do once you get your degree?" She asks you one night, when you're sitting by the river and watching the stars. 

"Find work, I guess." You give her a brief overview of your five-year plan, which involves assembling the perfect portfolio, sending it out to galleries, making contact with collectors and connoisseurs alike. Jan listens intently with a frown on her face, staring at you until you run out of breath. "And then?" She persists, pushing you, further, forward, and you find yourself lost for words. "You aren't going to spend your whole life working, are you? Art is more than that. Art is about making something to share with the world - to influence that world - to change it, to shape it. Art is about  _life,_  Tim. You shouldn't forget that."

You lean across and kiss her, and it sets your whole world right.

 

 

You are both a year away from finishing your respective degrees when Jan calls you, tells you to sit down, breaks the news about her father, wraps up without looking you in the eye. "I'm sorry, Tim. I have to go home."

And with those eight words, your whole world suddenly shifts on its axis. Every priority changes at that moment, spins on an angle. 

You have wanted this your whole life, this degree, you have chased this passion, you have poured your heart and soul into it,

but you still grab her hand and tell her you want to go with her. 

 

 

You tell Carlos even before you tell your parents. He reacts as well as can be expected, but he trusts you implicitly, and you are so grateful for it. He doesn't get angry, he doesn't question the validity of your decision, just wishes you well, and you know if your positions were swapped, you would have done the same for him.

Your parents are, surprisingly, not disappointed. They just ask if it would be all right with Jan if they moved to New Hampshire to be with both of you, too, which is the best thing you can think of. You start making your plans, you buy a ring, you hire a moving service - 

you start something new. 

 

 

Rochester is beautiful, and your parents love it, and they love their new apartment. Jan's parents approve of you, and her father has the chance to walk her down the aisle and hear his daughter tell him she's pregnant with his first grandchild before he passes away peacefully. Both of you take over the family business with some help from Jan's mother, and your art becomes sidelined as a hobby instead of as your career.

You think you should feel sadder, emptier, but when your daughter is born, you feel a joy and contentment that far surpasses anything you could have dreamed of.

This isn't how your teenage self would have seen your life playing out, but you don't think you'd give this up for anything.

 

 

 _Tusayan's changed,_ Carlos says in his letter. 

You look out into the garden at Jan and Val playing in the sandbox, and think,  _so have I._

 

 

You name your son Carl, for your best friend, and you include baby photos when Carlos sends you a letter complete with pictures from his daughter's second birthday party. 

Both of you have grown up so much, and it scares you, sometimes, how everything has changed, and yet, somehow, nothing really has. 

 _Come visit sometime,_ you write to Carlos, and you mean every word.

 

 

Perhaps it's because you and Carlos have such a profound bond of friendship, but you  _feel_ it when it happens - the shade of the world changes, the air tastes different. You have to sit down because the sheer strength of emotion cascading over you makes your knees go weak.

Jan rushes to your side when she sees you fall into a chair. "Tim. What's wrong?"

"The Bus." You say, with absolute certainty. "Carlos found the Bus."

Your wife gasps, softly. "Is he coming?"

You close your eyes and let the sensation of warmth and joy spill through you. "He's coming."

 

 

When Carlos arrives with Ralphie in tow, you have the sudden urge to buy a bigger house and invite all of your class to stay permanently. 

They are your family, too. 

"Daddy, want to go too!" Eliza wails, tugging on your sleeve when you're getting onto the Bus, and you ruffle her hair affectionately. "I'll be back soon, all right?"

"Come back safe." Jan whispers, pressing a kiss to your lips, and you want to use the Bus to go back in time and tell your younger self that everything turns out exactly the way it should. 

"I will." You answer, and step onto the Bus.


	5. limerick, ireland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: phoebe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mad messing with canon at this point. totally ignoring the existence or lack thereof of canon parents, all headcanons of which were effectively destroyed by the going batty episode.

Despite what your parents think, you don't want to move to New York -

but we don't always get the things we want. 

 

 

Walkerville Elementary is the first place you feel comfortable in your own skin. It's so different from everywhere you've ever been to, and you don't just mean the field trips. You're quiet, shy, endlessly sentimental and devoted to a cause, which is playground suicide. 

Your fifth-grade classmates don't taunt you for talking about your old schools. They teach you, instead, to move forward, to speak up, to believe - in others, and in yourself. You start to enjoy going to school, and you work hard on your science projects. 

Your parents don't notice how content you are, which is probably why they're so offhand about the announcement that you're packing up and leaving Arizona two weeks after your elementary school graduation. You do what you're best at - nod and smile and accept it quietly, then sneak out of the back door and into Arnold's back garden two houses down the moment they take their eyes off you. 

You tell him  _I don't want to leave,_ as if it'll make any difference. 

 

 

You leave in the middle of the night, so nobody is there to wave you off, but you send seven postcards out in succession once you've set up shop in New York. Your father talks about the exorbitant cost of air mail, but you stick the stamps on anyway. 

Replies come back, and they're the only things that keep you grounded while you're far from the place - and the people - you learned to call your home. 

It's manageable, for a while, until your mother gets a promotion and suddenly you're living out of cardboard boxes because you're in and out of apartments and houses and motel rooms faster than you can count. More often than not, the postcards you write include a new address for replying letters to be addressed to. Receptionists hand envelopes over to you when your parents check into new hotels booked weeks back. 

On the flight from Montreal to Munich, the airline loses a piece of your luggage. It's a suitcase with a lot of non-essentials in it, but that includes your list of addresses, the only copy you have, the only thing that keeps you connected to your friends. 

It's a torturous three weeks sitting in a rented flat, getting postcards in the mail, staring at the messages and being unable to reply. 

The next time you move, you're sixteen and no more mail arrives for you. 

It's hard to break the habit of running to the front door every time you hear the post come, but you force yourself to do it anyway.

 

 

On your nineteenth birthday, you blow out the candles on your cake, think about how you haven't seen your hometown and your extended family since you were three years old, and you put your foot down.

You have a pretty good feeling that the only reason your parents don't disown you for flying to Dublin, taking a course in veterinary medicine at UCD and dating ten schoolmates in succession, is because you're their only child and they're pinning all their hopes on you. 

Your mother does come down to Ireland, once, to talk to you in your dorm.

"Don't waste your life." She pleads to you, and you can't help but marvel at the fact that she doesn't think she's wasted hers.

 

 

The first time you step back onto Limerick soil, it overwhelms you with its beauty, and you don't understand how your parents could have left this place to spend half their lives in airplanes and the other half in an office. 

Your uncle runs a veterinary clinic and takes you under his wing for all of a week before he realises you're more than capable of running the place on your own. Two years later he retires, and takes down his nameplate, puts another one up. This one has your name on it in brass lettering. 

"Your ma ought to be proud of you." He says, and you laugh. "She's not, not really." 

Your uncle shakes his head, looking aggrieved. "I know. Never understood that sister of mine. But she ought to be, anyway."

_Yes,_ you think. She should. 

 

 

Your parents visit you a year after you take over the business and operate it singlehandedly. With a great deal of reluctance, you walk them around your flat, show them the office, introduce them to your girlfriend, your dog, and your five fighting fish. 

You invite them for dinner. They decline, opting instead to return to their hotel room and order room service. 

Later that night, you get a call from your father.

"Phoebe, why do you keep disappointing us?" He asks, sounding so genuinely vexed that you want to punch him.

"Why do you keep disappointing me?" You answer, and hang up. 

You change your cellphone number and field the calls to the office by hiring a secretary, who is exceedingly polite to your parents for a good five seconds before she puts the phone down and ignores it in favour of doing the monthly accounts. 

Everything goes well - you make a good wage, become part of the community, have weekly dinners with your uncle, aunt and cousins, you save the lives of a good many animals, you manage a steady relationship with your girlfriend, and you don't wonder all that often if everything good that has ever come out of your life was penance of sorts for the miserable excuse of a family you've got. 

It doesn't make it easier to bear.

 

 

You're thirty years old when you lose your first animal. There's a massive ten-car pile up on the freeway and a lot of people are rushed to the hospital, but two dogs are sent to your doorstep instead. One is a young, healthy kerry blue, which hasn't sustained much more than a broken hind leg, but the other is a border collie well past its prime, and the moment its owner runs in through the door, your breath catches in your throat.

"Please!" She begs, still bleeding from a wound in her shoulder, eyes wild with desperation. "Please save him, he's all I have left."

And you do your utmost on the operating table - 

you _do -_  

but you feel the dog's heart stop beating beneath your hands. 

"Miss Davenport." Your secretary says gently, putting an arm around the owner's shoulders and leading her to a chair. "Would you like to take a seat?"

After, you go to the trash can outside the back door and vomit up everything in your stomach. Your chest heaves, and you can't see. 

You know it's inevitable, that this is what any professional in the medical industry will have to face sometime or another, but it doesn't quell the screaming pain in your heart. 

 

 

You go on extended leave after that. Your uncle gives you an impassioned speech two weeks in, and tries to pep you up in the fifth, but even he gives up after a while. 

The office gathers dust while you try to battle your own demons, trying and failing to convince yourself that you're not a disappointment after all. 

 

 

Exactly twelve days before the Bus arrives for you, an eleven-year-old girl runs a mile from her home and bangs on your door with her small fists at two in the morning. In her arms is the limp frame of a beautiful siamese cat, and there are tears in her eyes. 

"Please, Ms Terese, save my kitty." She begs, and she sounds so uncannily like the owner of the border collie that you quite nearly shut the door on her. 

"I'm not - practicing - right now." You answer, stiff and heady with sleep.

She shakes her head with the vehemence of a child who can wrap her head around nothing but the fact that her beloved pet is dying. "But you're a vet, you have to save her! Please, she's  _dying!_ That's what doctors do, right? They save people, and animals!"

You both stand there and look at each other for a minute before you take the cat from her grasp, lay it on the dining table and grab the tools of your trade. 

The girl watches you the whole while, and when her pet is out of danger, she hugs you tight and doesn't let go.

"Thank you." She whimpers, sobbing, and you dig your nails into the flesh of your palm.

The next day, you open the office again.

 

 

And your fifth-grade classmates taught you a lot, but this is something you've taught yourself - 

you're more than your past, you're more than your history, you're more than your parents. 

You are your choices.

You choose this. 

 

 

"Stop worrying, I'm not going to close the office again in a long time." You reassure your secretary, and that's when you spot the Bus walking into the office on four legs. "You know what, go home and have the rest of the day off. I'm closing the office for the rest of the afternoon."

"Ms Terese!" She says, straddling the line between horrified and furious, and you grin, following the dog out through the back door. 

"I'll be back soon." You call. "I _promise."_


	6. london, england

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: arnold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woah shit! where did those siblings come from? 
> 
> i have absolutely no idea how to cite london lawsuits or lawsuits anywhere for that matter.

This much you know - 

everyone is right about the proverbial well and the water.

 

 

You're probably the only one in your class who's relieved to bid farewell to your out-of-this-world field trips with Ms Frizzle, and to be honest, you don't feel sorry about it. 

Is it so wrong to want some normalcy in your life?

You regret everything, of course, the moment you actually go on a normal field trip to the water reclamation plant, and you tell Carlos as much. 

And perhaps it's  _because_ you were so averse to the field trips before, but you start to thirst for knowledge and adventure more than you ever did before fifth grade. Nothing satisfies you anymore, and you're always on your feet, always looking for something new to explore. Your parents talk about the change in hushed tones behind closed doors, but encourage your passions anyway. 

Tusayan becomes far too small for you, and it doesn't get better the older you grow. 

"I don't want to leave." Phoebe cries to you, when you're but children, and selfishly you think,  _but I do._

 

Wanda, Phoebe, Ralphie and D.A. all leave before you do, which isn't their fault.

You leave right out of middle school, which is yours.

Lying to your class is a betrayal of the highest dishonour, but you do it anyway - tell them that your father bagged a promotion and he's carting the family off to London. It's a half-truth, but you conveniently leave out the part where he sits the family down at the table and tells you the news, but gets everyone to put it to a vote. 

Your mother and brother vote no. Your sister and father vote yes. 

Yours is the deciding pick.

You don't see your mother's fear that uprooting you and your siblings will wreak havoc on your psyches and your schoolwork. You don't see your father's ambition. You don't see your brother's fierce love and loyalty towards Tusayan, and you don't see your sister's practical outlook on how moving to London will put food on the table for your growing family with one more on the way. 

All you see is novelty, and a bigger world for you to explore, and it feels right when you swallow and say  _yes,_ but even then it sticks in your throat, just a little, digging into your chest, and you think of the class, of your  _friends._

You are brave and your classmates know you to be the loyal one, but perhaps priorities change, and after all, you are so  _young._

You tell them you'll be back, someday, sometime, soon, and this, at least, is not a lie.

 

 

You think, or hope, maybe, that London will astound you beyond belief, and does it ever. From the first moment you step into Heathrow clutching your knapsack, it entrances you. 

Your father settles into a new office with relish and your sister starts scouting for schools, while your brother looks out of his bedroom window at the endless wash of rain pattering on the glass and your mother frets about the central heating while setting up a cot for the new baby. 

You make friends with your neighbours down the hall. There are four families living on the same floor, and you become intimately familiar with all of them. They come from all walks of life and you learn so much about the world through their eyes - which is good, because public school in London is nothing like you've ever known and teaches you nothing, save how to keep your head down and not get it flushed in the toilet. Your classmates jeer at you for telling them you're from Tusayan - or as they put it,  _buttfuck nowhere_ \- and before your first week is out, you've watched two freshmen get beaten up. You're basically ostracised the first time you talk about your fascination with rocks. 

Sitting alone for lunch isn't bad, not really, but you spend a lot of afternoons trudging home and wondering how these people would have turned out differently if Ms Frizzle had turned them into snowflakes and sent them hurtling down to earth into Carlos' raincatcher. 

Wanda writes to you from Beijing, asks how school is going. 

You bite your pencil, shrug, write,  _these people are animals._

Your brother laughs when he reads it, and pats you on the back. 

 

 

You toy with the idea of becoming a geologist after college, which your parents actually encourage, and it's such smooth sailing you forget about missing Tusayan at all until your little sister gets run down by a truck in front of your eyes. 

Everything goes downhill after that, for a variety of reasons. The case is flawless but the perp is rich, so he walks anyway. Your mother dies in the bathtub while you're not at home, and your father and sister both spend a year trying to convince a jury they're innocent of murder. Your brother spends the rest of his life looking at both of them funny even after they're acquitted. 

You watch all of them go about their daily business with their shoulders sagging and eyes haunted, and you think,  _fuck it, I'm becoming a lawyer._

 

 

In the end, it's more of an adventure than you'd ever have dreamed. Apparently you have a knack for the whole law thing, and your first day on the job harks back to that one time you were Ms Frizzle's defendant in the classroom/courtroom. 

Perhaps, even then, fate of some sort was priming you for the rest of your life.

\- or maybe it was Ms Frizzle. She was magical, after all.

You start from the very bottom and work your way to the top, and you never forget why you're here in the first place - you want to defend the innocent, you want to keep lives intact, you want to put criminals behind bars where they belong, and people laugh at you for your lofty ideals, but you got used to that a long, long time ago. 

 

 

Your brother becomes a elementary school teacher, and invites you over one day for Career Week, to talk about your profession, give it a new, fresh spin. 

You walk in and these kids are bug-eyed, open-mouthed, and they remind you of - you, back when. There's a small boy in the front row who's Carlos to the life, and he raises his hand when you're done with your talk. "Isn't it boring to be a lawyer?" 

You shake your head and laugh -  _kid, you have no idea._

You see the darnedest people, argue the strangest cases, spend hours and hours researching on the darkest depths of the web for the sake of your defendants - 

it's not digging for rocks and studying minerals, but it's definitely not boring. 

 

 

Against everything you or the firm could have dreamed of, you actually  _win_ the  _Santiago v. City of New London_ suit, and Wanda calls you long-distance. 

"Arnold Perlstein, you just might be the eighth world wonder."

You gape, because it's been so long but her voice is the same and you recognise it the minute she says hello. "How did you even  _get_  this number?" 

She snorts. The line crackles. "You sure don't keep up with Hong Kong news, do you?" 

You haven't heard her voice in years - or any of your other fifth-grade classmates' either, for that matter. 

"You been back home yet?" Wanda asks, and suddenly you're swept up in nostalgia, the adrenaline high draining from your veins. You lean back in your chair and rub your eyes, sighing. "No, I haven't."

"Yeah?" She replies, and you detect a hint of regret in her tone. "Neither have I." 

 

 

You have the luxury of pondering the idea of visiting Tusayan again after over a decade for about less than twenty-four hours before you're suddenly the golden boy of the firm. You're bombarded with requests for interviews, critics flooding your email inbox, your superiors calling you to their office all the time. 

The money comes in stacks and your name is on everyone's lips, but you forget how to breathe. You request for a day of leave, and then another, and soon enough you're working out of the house more often than you're in the office building. 

It's a sunny day, though - rare for London at this time of the year - so you take a stroll to your office and settle down in your chair and reflect on why you worked so hard for this anyway - you wanted to  _help_ people, that was always the point, and you're so tired you're not even sure if that's what you're doing any more. 

You turn on your PC and start searching for flights to Tusayan. 

 

 

Two coffee breaks later, the Bus flutters onto your desk in the form of a butterfly and the first thing you think is,  _my god, I'll be saving on airfare._

You're so glad you didn't stay home today. 


	7. kowloon, hong kong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: wanda.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so wanda is voiced by a japanese-american in the tv series but her surname is the most chinese to ever chinese - source: i'm 100% chinese born and bred - so i'm rolling with that and writing about a culture i'm familiar with!

Nobody ever tells you  _anything -_

so you stop telling anybody about yourself either. 

 

 

Your family moves around China so quickly that William grows up speaking a smattering of ten different dialects and he's fluent in exactly none of them. Whenever your mother broaches the topic of finally settling somewhere, your father's totally dismissive about it all, and you're on a plane next thing. 

It really takes the novelty out of wanting to become a pilot. 

You notice, perhaps, on the periphery, even before your mother does. Little things add up. You think you might actually do well on the stage or on the silver screen, because you centre a few years of your childhood on pretending everything is fine and you've noticed nothing out of the ordinary. 

You're very good at doing surprise, when the police come to your door and ask for your father. You're clutching a pen and notepaper when you open the front gate, and you think of writing to Arnold -  _finally._

 

 

After a messy divorce and even messier trial, your mother takes you and your brother back to Beijing, and you all settle in with your grandparents. She is admirably stoic about it all, but you can see how tired she is, all the faith she's lost in the world and herself. 

"What do you want to be when you leave college?" She asks you when you're washing the dishes one night, and you swallow down the ache in your throat that screams,  _an actress._

"I was thinking I'd do law." You answer, and you mean every word.

Acting can be your life, instead of your career, and you are already so proficient at that.

Your mother continues scrubbing at a pan. "That's a good path." She says, sounding offhand, but you can see her hands trembling in relief. 

 

 

 _These people are animals,_ Arnold declares in his missive. 

 _So were we once,_ you quip back, and wonder how your own academically-inclined classmates would react to the concept of the Bus.

 

 

Your father is released from prison when you're seventeen, and your mother hides that fact from you up till the point he knocks on your door, looking haggard and worn. 

He doesn't even finish saying your name before your mother sweeps in, brandishing a blunted kitchen chopper in his face. "Get out." She says calmly in perfect Pekingese, and it's not lost on you how she chooses to speak her own dialect instead of their shared Teochew. 

"I'm just here to see my children." He replies quietly, but his gaze is fixated on your mother. 

She tightens her grip on the chopper. "You gave that up when you decided to get involved in fraud and embezzlement." Her voice drops. "Leave. Or I will not be held responsible for my actions. I won't tell you again."

Your father's glance slides to yours. "Take care of your little brother."

Your mouth shapes the words  _I will,_ but he's already gone.

Your mother lowers the chopper and shuts the front door, then leans against it and sobs for fifteen minutes. 

"What's wrong?" William asks you when you go up to his room and sit by his desk, staring at his homework. 

"Nothing." You answer, in a tone you hope is reassuring. "Now what about your sums can't you figure out?"

 

 

You have so many questions -  _why_ and  _how_ and  _when_ and  _what's going to happen from now on_? - but your mother flat-out refuses to answer any of them. 

You think it might be a Chinese born-and-bred thing, but Tusayan is the place you call home and you don't understand why she can't just give you straight answers. In retaliation you clam up, and you confide in William but not in her. 

It's selfish, but you don't realise that until you're older and wiser, and by then, it's too late. 

 

 

You pass the national judicial exam with flying colours. William bowls you over in a bearhug, and your mother grips your shoulder tightly and says, "I'm so proud of you."

Your smile is plastic on your face. "I'm glad."

A week later you jump ship to Hong Kong and start working in a firm there. Your brother calls you even before you're done unpacking your essentials.

"I can't believe you." He sighs, and you can hear him rolling his eyes from the Mainland. 

"I'm not abandoning you." You say, like you didn't just do the very selfsame thing. 

William stays silent for a few seconds. "Take care of yourself."

"Take care of Mom."

You send half of your first paycheck back home, a penance your brother informs you is well-received. 

 

 

Law isn't a bad profession to be in, and it challenges you in ways you'd never imagine. You rise up in the ranks and get to know the inner workings of Hong Kong, learn how to converse in Cantonese. 

Your colleagues consider you an oddity, since they've never heard of Tusayan, and badger you to tell stories about your childhood, about America. 

"Do you miss it?" One of the interns asks, when you're both on coffee break.

"Yeah." You murmur, trying to figure out if it's a truth or not. "I do."

 

 

 _Santiago v. City of New London_ is splashed on thousands of major league newspapers worldwide, and suddenly you see Arnold's face everywhere, and you realise you stopped receiving postcards a long time ago.

When did that happen?

William sends you an email with a newspaper article attached.  _Isn't that your old friend?_

You drum your fingers on your desk and look down at your blazer and perfectly pressed pants, then walk into your boss' office with a smile. "Hey, ma'am, do you have Arnold Perlstein's work number?"

 

 

He's got an accent now, heavy and English as it gets, but he reminds you of home. 

You pick up your phone and call back to Mainland. 

"William speaking." Your brother says, and you smile. "Hey, Will. I was just wondering - what do you think of taking a trip back home?"

"What?" He replies, sounding puzzled. "Wanda, this  _is_ my home."

You feel something cold slide through your veins, because you  _never_ thought, even after all this time - 

"William." You say, clear and firm. "We come from Tusayan. You know this."

There's silence for a long time, and you almost think the line's disconnected, and then he sighs. "No, Wanda. You do." His voice hardens. "Do you know how young I was when we first left? I haven't called it home in _years._ You just - is this why you went to Hong Kong? Have you just been running all your life? Couldn't you have at least  _tried_ to call China your home? For us?" 

You don't know what to say to that, how you can possibly convey how much Tusayan and Walkerville Elementary and your class meant - _still_ mean - to you, so you cut the call and hang up. 

 

 

Maybe William's right and all you've been doing all your life is run. 

And maybe you're also right and that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because sure, you've been running, but you've always known where you were running to.

"Wanda!" Carlos calls from aboard the Bus, and damn right you're going to take the wheel from him before the day is out and pilot the Bus like you always wanted to do when you were ten. 

You dump your paperwork into a drawer and toss your heels off, and you're smiling when you approach the Bus.

You're going home. 


	8. quilpie, queensland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> pov: dorothy ann.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this series has been a journey. really enjoyed exploring my childhood and sharpening them writing skills. 
> 
> the final chapter is deliberately short and a little meta.

_there are no happy endings / endings are the saddest part -_

_so just give me a happy middle / and a very happy start._

 

There are so many things you want to say, when it's time to leave. 

Carlos ruins it all by coming up to you with his slight smile and his sincere words, and you just can't look him in the eye.  _Thank you,_ for one, and  _you were such good friends, all of you,_ and  _don't forget me, please, because I never will._

All you manage to say is  _goodbye._

 

 

Quilpie, if nothing, is a lot like Tusayan - small and quiet and close-knit. Your new classmates are welcoming and everything moves at a slow pace, just the way you like it. You get to see the stars at night.

You wonder where yours is. 

 

 

You start writing a diary, because talking about your experiences makes them easier to bear. Your essays get A grades when you turn them in, and your form tutor briefly jokes if you've considered becoming an author.

You take his words to heart, and spend a month polishing a story that you base upon your own memory of the Bus - a group of young children going on an adventure into space. It impresses everyone from your parents to the town elders, and words gets around quickly, like it always does. 

"D.A., you should write a book!" Evan enthuses, in classic little-kid fashion, and it turns out to be what you spend your college years doing. It takes a copious amount of blood and sweat and tears, but by the time you're twenty, you've got a rough draft of about fifty short stories that basically depict your fifth-grade adventures with Ms Frizzle, the Bus and your classmates. You teach elementary school science while working on your book so it's publisher-ready, and it takes a while, but when it's finally accepted and printed and put on the shelves, it's an instant hit. You call it  _Magic School Bus_ \- creativity was never your strong suit - and it doesn't really gain much traction out of Australia, but within the continent, it's a household name. Every kid knows your name and has your book on their shelves. 

It's certainly something. 

 

 

"I've always been curious." Evan says to you when you've just finished your first book tour and you're back home, sitting on the porch and sipping wine. "Did all that really happen?"

"What, the adventures in  _Magic School Bus?"_

"Yeah. They always felt so  _real,_ you know? Like you'd actually been there, done that."

You grin, and the stars seem brighter tonight. You place your glass down and turn to your younger sister. "Can you keep a secret?"

 

 

When the Bus finally comes, you know what you're in for, and while everyone's having dinner and laughing and reminiscing, you pack yourself a bag of essentials to take along on your trip, wherever you might be going.

You debate for a moment before squeezing a copy of  _Magic School Bus_ into your backpack as well. You think Ms Frizzle would enjoy reading it. You grab a marker and sign the first page, right beneath the title. 

_Thank you for my childhood._

 

 

"Bus." You say with gravitas, and it feels like the world shakes beneath your feet. "Please take us to Ms Frizzle."

 

 

And you fly. 

**Author's Note:**

> disclaimers: follows tv canon since my memory of book canon is a little suspect + i don't get how american school works what with americans starting the school year in september or something - seriously how does this make any sense - so i'm just messing around with the timeline and all that + i headcanon the mbs series to have happened in tusayan, arizona, solely because it's my favourite place in the whole of the usa + i can't find any canon evidence for how old the kids are at the time of the show, so i'm going with fifth grade for plot purposes.


End file.
